Vega Code, Blobs and 'Leaks'

For those habitually riding the bleeding-edge open-source Radeon graphics driver stack, there are some updated firmware files now available for newer AMD graphics processors.

Hitting Linux-Firmware.Git this morning are updated Vega 20 files for the likes of the Radeon VII, Polaris 12 updates, and updated firmware for the yet-to-debut Picasso APUs. Other generations of AMD Radeon GPUs are unchanged in the linux-firmware tree.

While it is hard to tell what exactly this GPU is, if Linux's driver IDs can be trusted, it doesn't appear to be Navi. Even if the GPU is from the Navi lineup, it's hard to glean useful performance data and GPU specifications due to the nature of the CompuBench benchmark. For now, it appears more likely this is just another Vega 20 GPU, perhaps even a new WX Pro series model.

One month since the release of ROCm 2.1, the Radeon Open Compute stack has now been succeeded by ROCm 2.2.

The ROCm 2.2 release shipping today comes as a bit of a surprise. It's not the most feature-packed update but does have some nice additions while building on the already exciting ROCm 2.0 that shipped at the end of 2018.

ROCm 2.2 brings rocSPARSE optimizations for Vega 20 with cache usage improvements, improved DGEMM performance for reduced matrix sizes, and with Caffe2 there is now support for multi-GPU training.

With the help of Natural Language Processing, an organisation can gain valuable insights, patterns, and solutions. Python is one of the widely used languages and it is implemented in almost all fields and domains. In this article, we list down 10 important Python Natural Language Processing Language libraries.

On June 27th, Red Hat will not only be hosting one of the best technical gatherings of 2019, but it will be doing so in Washington D.C. — not San Francisco, Seattle, or ... DevNation Federal conference will bring together industry experts and key maintainers of popular open source projects in a one-day immersive conference for federal developers.

The bug report count of KTextEditor (implementing the editing part used in Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/Kile/…) and Kate itself reached again some value over 200.
If you have time and need an itch to scratch, any help to tackle the currently open bugs would be highly appreciated.
The full list can be found with this bugs.kde.org query.
[...]
The team working on the code is small, therefore please be a bit patient if you wait for reactions. I hope we have improved our reaction time in the last months but we still are lacking in that respect.

In the last month, we’ve polished the user interface and added the last planned features to Blender 2.80. The details can be found in the weekly development notes.
Now we are freezing the user interface, so that there is a stable base for creating documentation and tutorials. Settings will stay in the same place and screenshots should remain valid for the final 2.80 release. A handful of menu entries may be added, or a tooltip might be improved, but nothing major that would break documentation.

In order to meet the July release target for Blender 2.80, there is now an API and user-interface freeze on this next feature update for this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software.
Blender 2.80 has now entered its UI and API freeze milestone for the 2.80 release. The Blender settings should also be maintained now moving forward for the Blender 2.80 release and its Python API compatibility, including for add-ons.

FreeBSD 11.3 Beta 1

24 May: The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

While FreeBSD 12 is the latest and greatest stable series since the end of last year, for those still on FreeBSD 11 there is the 11.3 update due out for release in July while this weekend the first beta was issued.
FreeBSD 11.3 offers up the latest security updates and other stable bug fixes over FreeBSD 11.2 that was released nearly one year ago. But for those craving all the latest features and functionality, FreeBSD 12 is in release form or there is also FreeBSD 13-CURRENT.

Best Command-Line FTP Clients for Linux

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a network protocol used for transferring files between a client and a server on a computer network. The very first FTP applications were made for the command line before GUI Operating Systems even became a thing and while there are several GUI FTP clients, developers still make CLI-based FTP clients for users who prefer using the old method.
Here’s a list of the best command-line based FTP clients for Linux.

Latest News

6 Open Source Android Alternative Operating Systems For Mobiles

In the wake of the ongoing US-Huawei-Google tussle, many Android enthusiasts are wondering about the different alternative phone operating systems that are out there. We have Apple’s iOS at our disposal, but the cost of owning an iPhone makes it an impossible choice for many.
This prompted me to create a list of other Android alternatives that are being developed or being used in mobile devices. The options that have been included in this list are open source, so any developer can grab the code and fork it to create something new for free. Huawei is itself creating its own operating system but I haven’t included it on this as the details are scarce.

Fedora 31 Planning To Upgrade To RPM 4.15 For Faster Builds, Other Improvements

RPM 4.15 is due out this year as the latest RPM4 update and Fedora 31 is planning to make prompt use of RPM 4.15 given its new/improved features.
RPM 4.15 is expected to provide faster build performance, a dynamic build dependency generator, experimental chroot operations for non-root users, improved ARM detection, and a whole lot of fixes.
More Fedora: Sirko Kemter: Khmer Translation Sprint 3